Highlights from today's news

First up, gender equality for pugilists!

Women's boxing will be at the Olympics for the first time ever in 2012. While the acceptance that actually, yes women can fight properly, is good to see, I find boxing in general to be troubling and would much rather see it banned outright; since as far as I can tell the objective is to cause sufficient damage to the opponents central nervous system as to leave them incapable of coordinated actions (a knock-out where that involves inability to stand, a technical knock-out where it involves inability to defend oneself), I find boxing to be barbaric.

Be that as it may, since people know what they're getting into with boxing when they choose to fight, I have to concede that regardless of my disgust for the concept (I actually often watch boxing because especially the lower weight divisions, the athleticism and skill is truly admirable) I accept people's right to do what they want with their bodies. However foolish and ultimately destructive I might feel that to be.

And women have the same right to be stupid as men do, so women's boxing is, in terms of acknowledging women's bodily autonomy, a good thing. I guess.

It's also fair to say that the Olympic version of the sport is much less about the big K.O. than professional boxing is, which means that the damage done to one's opponent (or oneself) is lessened.

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The other really cool thing was the Twitter defence of the NHS. Apparently, in attempts to stop even the halfway house proposals of the Obama administration being enacted, the rightwing USAian opinion-makers have been telling a lot of porky-pies about the NHS and claiming that the US system is superior. I, and many other Brits it appears, believe just the opposite and that the NHS is one of the great innovations of British government.

[EDIT TO ADD: Penny Red has a great post about the same issue]

The NHS has never been perfect. When it was originally set up it was riddled with institutional racism, heteronormative patriarchal-family model centred ideas. It's been atrociously served by subsequent administrations and in real terms is hopelessly underfunded (and overloaded with a "market system" that does nothing to serve patients and only eats up money on bureaucrats...). But I'd still choose it over the private healthcare system the USA has. For fuck's sake, what the USA system is closest to is what we had in the Victorian era in terms of the social structure of medical care (or at least, what we had pre-WW2). There's a reason that Britain changed to a socialised healthcare system, which is because the alternative didn't work and doesn't work.

Indeed, if the money currently paid by UKians into private healthcare programmes and private health insurance were channelled instead into the NHS I am sure that there would be actually very little benefit to choosing to go private anyway; and if the Government were to fund the NHS properly (instead of, for example, going and fighting illegal wars that they can't afford anyway) then who knows what the possibilities would be?

So, yeah - the NHS has never been perfect, but I would never want to live in a country without a national health service. And it's kinda cool to realise that a lot of other people feel the same way too.

(In case anyone's wondering, without the NHS I'd probably be dead by now, since it paid for my anti-depression meds)